New York Times earmarks $5 million to cover Trump admin, but budget cuts loom

The New York Times is planning a $5 million investment earmarked to cover the Trump Administration, according to an email sent to staff at the newspaper this morning by executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn.

“We will use these resources to ensure that we remain ahead in chronicling the Trump era in Washington, New York, the nation and the world,” Baquet and Kahn wrote. “We will be adding to the ranks of our investigative journalists and subject-area experts, from taxes and immigration to education and climate change, to ensure that no one has more compelling coverage on the White House and beyond.”

Baquet and Kahn’s memo also lays out the Times’ “2020 report,” which seeks to lay out a path forward for the Times in a turbulent media and political environment. The report, which has been in the works for nearly a year (see POLITICO's preview from last June here), takes a wide-reaching look at the future of the company.

To that end, while there will be the new investment in covering Trump, the Times is also planning for budget cuts later this year.

“Nothing can disguise the fact that the continued shift from print to digital demands a somewhat smaller and more focused newsroom,” Baquet and Kahn wrote. “There will be budget cuts this year. We will lay out the specifics in the coming weeks and months. We cannot pretend to be immune from financial pressures but we view this moment as a necessary repositioning of The Times’s newsroom, not as a diminishment.”

Last month the Times announced that it plans to vacate “at least eight floors” in its midtown Manhattan office building, consolidating teams and eliminating standalone offices. Tuesday's memo suggests that the move is just one part of larger cost-saving measures.

The 2020 report suggests that copy editors and other editing staffers may be among those whose jobs are on the line, as it shifts investment to newsgathering.

“The Times currently devotes too many resources to low-value editing — and, by extension, too many to editing overall,” the memo said. “Our journalism and our readers would be better served if we instead placed an even higher priority on newsgathering in all of its forms.”

Baquet and Kahn were more blunt in their memo:

"Let’s not be coy. These changes will lead to fewer editors at The Times. One of our overarching goals is to keep as many reporters, photographers, graphics experts and videographers on the ground as possible."

One overarching theme of the report is that the Times needs to focus on revenue from readers, and place less emphasis on revenue from advertisers.

To that end, the report clearly states that the Times “is a subscription-first business,” and should not emphasize pageviews. That being said, the company “is in the latter stages of creating a more sophisticated metric than pageviews, one that tries to measure an article’s value to attracting and retaining subscribers,” per the report. “This metric seems a promising alternative to pageviews."

The 2020 report also lays out a plan to rethink the Times’ print newspaper, to increase diversity, training and outside hiring, and to make Times reporting more “visual.” The paper is also rethinking how it uses freelancers and stringers, suggesting it may look to wire services to fill some gaps.

"We rely on stringers in every state and around the world for routine coverage of stories that too often does not surpass the quality or speed of the wires and that requires considerable effort editing and coordinating," the report said.

The Times will also create an “innovation team” that looks into new technology and decides where the Times should jump in, and where it should stay mostly on the sidelines.

“We can’t pursue every idea, but we must pursue some of them,” Kahn and Baquet wrote. “Every corner of the newsroom has ideas for what those should be, but there aren’t enough places to pitch them. We will form a new team to solicit those big ideas and bring the best of them to life.”

One of the areas being looked at for change is "features," which is being reoriented toward service journalism.

"The Times’s current features strategy dates to the creation of new sections in the 1970s. The driving force behind these sections, such as Living and Home, was a desire to attract advertising," the report said.

"The Times must also find a better formula for engaging readers digitally in these topics, most likely by offering far more useful, service-oriented journalism that takes full advantage of interactive digital platforms and relies less on repurposing of coverage intended for print," Baquet and Kahn's memo added.